Book Talk Review; Hell On Heels

A beautiful, moving book

I use people. 

Not in a malicious way, but in the way an addict abuses their substance of choice. 

People are my vice—men specifically.

 I crave the emotional high they give me with a unique and reckless disregard for my own well-being—eagerly floating into an unsustainable euphoria, knowing full well that after every high comes an equal, if not more powerful, plummet into a devastating abyss. 

But like every junkie, I crawl willingly back into the arms of my demons.

Oh, the price we pay to feel loved. 

We’d all sell our souls to the devil himself for that.

 Perhaps I have already.

They say that acknowledging that you have a problem is one of the first steps to recovery. 

Well, in that case, my name is Charleston Smith and I have a fucking problem.  

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This book was hard for me to read for a multitude of reasons. 

I can't tell you everything, because that would give spoilers, and I don't do that. But I can tell you that this book was so different than what I thought it was going to be.

There's so much emotion, so much truth, so much life in this book. 

Charleston is so different than any other character I've read. She has a different feel to her, I guess you can say. She's real, she's honest with herself-at least she learns to be. 

Charleston doesn't make excuses for what she does. She doesn't try to hide herself. She hides of course, but then again, don't we all? 

I believe that there is a little Charleston in all of us. 

We all have our vices. The things that we are truly addicted to. We all try to pretend that it isn't there. We all lie to ourselves. But it's real, it's there, haunting us. 

This book shows one of the ugliest things. It shows the addictive side of human nature. It shows how we use people, how we use ourselves. 

It also shows why we do it. 

I would recommend this book to anyone who is going through a hard time. This I feel is the type of book we can learn from. 

It has an interesting band of characters, some drama, and some hardships. 

This book is meant to reveal, the truth within all of us. This book isn't going to be for everyone. And that's okay. 

It's not meant to be for everyone. 

I feel that we all can connect with Charleston, if we really wanted too. 

That's what makes it difficult to get through this book. Because we can see ourselves in the characters. We might not like it, we might not admit it to ourselves. But we all go through the same hardships, the same triumphs. We just handle it differently. 

I applaud Anne Jolin for writing this book. It couldn't have been easy. 

-Abri